I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado from Berea, Ohio after my high school graduation. After attending classes at Colorado State University for a few years, I dropped out to work in an all-night fast-food joint. It was always my intention to write novels, and a burger job seemed like a good way to pay bills while I planned my literary career. It was at that restaurant that I was introduced to the “mystery” that would lead to my second novel.

It happened like this: I was flipping burgers, and looked up to see my eighth-grade English teacher at the front counter. Mrs. M_____ had a distinctive, pretty face, but my old home town was 1400 miles away, and it had been five years or so since graduation, so I wasn’t sure it was her. I caught her eye, and when it seemed she recognized me, I went to the counter to say hello.

I asked if she remembered me. “Of course I do,” she said.

I asked how Berea was. She said our town was as pretty as ever, though I might not recognize some of it since it was growing so fast. I asked what brought her out to Colorado, and she answered that she was on vacation. She asked what I was doing, and I told her that cooking was a temporary job, that I was going to be a writer.

Then I asked her if she was still teaching. She cocked her head a little, perplexed, and said, “I’m not a teacher.” She was an administrative assistant at the small, private college in Berea. She had never taught English.

I remember the chill that ran down my spine.

She looked just like my eighth-grade teacher, you see, and she came from the same small town in Ohio, and I looked just like the boy down the street who used to mow her lawn, but I wasn’t him, and she wasn’t her.

I went home wondering. What did it all mean? Surely it meant something! And if I could divine the meaning, I would have an answer key to the mysteries of life. And I’d have a book. I would pass on my wise answers, and I would be famous. (Forgive me, I was in my early twenties.)

There were multiple ways of interpreting the meaning of the incident. Perhaps I was “home sick.” Perhaps one of us was lying. (Was she dodging the past? Had she been fired? I recall her odd, pensive expression when she realized we’d never met before. Did she think I was running some sort of scam?)

The Triumph of Death Peter Bruegel The Elder

Perhaps the message in the mystery was spiritual.

Gazing at the night sky, your eye forces convention on a glimpse of the infinite. Billions of stars racing into an expanding universe somehow flatten out into a dome, with boundaries (the horizon) and ordered patterns (constellations). Perhaps the mystery was a paradigm-shift, a reminder from a higher power that not everything could fit in my worldly shoe-box.

As for the possibility of mere coincidence, the odds seemed stacked against it. How could two sets of doppelgängers live in a small town and never run into each other, never hear from a neighbor or friend that they know someone who “looks just like” the other. Preposterous.

Whatever the truth, I wanted to know– What does it all mean? That was how I defined the mystery. Now I suspect that it was my definition that got in the way.

The dictionary, by the way, offers several significant definitions for “mystery.” A mystery is something that eludes understanding. The word “mystery” is also used to describes incidents in the life of Jesus, used as starting points for Christian meditation, and for certain Christian sacraments, such as the Eucharist. In the publishing world, mystery is a genre puzzle that results from a confounding crime, a puzzle to be analyzed and solved..

“The Apocalypse Parable” is the book I promised that I’d someday write to explore the mystery of the stranger who was not my eighth-grade teacher (and in the end, to explore the notion of “mystery” itself.) The book does manage to answer every important question in the world in just a few hundred pages.

“The Apocalypse Parable” is a mystery, though the narrative won’t fit in the shoe-box of genre conventions. It’s also a comedy, and probably a horror story too.

I’ve been working in restaurants now for thirty-five years (no longer a “temporary” vocation). I traveled a few continents, I rode a bull, I bungee-jumped from a crane, met thousands of people and married two of them, lost a brother and found dozens of friends, and raised children I love and also like. My chili recipe has won awards. This is all to say that I’ve been around, and I know some things.

And I know this– If I’m at a book-signing for “The Apocalypse Parable,” and I look up to see a woman with a distinguished face, silver-haired by now, visiting from Ohio, smiling in recognition, I will not be surprised, because I know how the world works. I’ll smile knowingly, and I’ll put down my pen, and I’ll run like hell. And I won’t stop until the only mystery left is how such old man ran so very far without dropping.